Aetna, which for several years has been in the forefront of health insurers using health IT, last month launched CarePass to help people achieve their health goals. Carepass, available to both Aetna members and non-members, helps users choose among popular mobile health apps, download the ones they want and track their health improvement progress.

Martha Wofford, an Aetna VP and head of the CarePass program, told InformationWeek Healthcare that the company will soon allow its members' Aetna personal health records (PHRs) to be integrated with some of the mobile apps. An integration with a medication adherence app will be announced within a few weeks, she said.

"With that kind of an app, you can imagine that instead of the person keying in their medications, they're populating it from their PHR. So the drug, the dosage and all that can pull through and they don't have re-key it."

Similarly, other applications could use data from a member's medical records to inform the use of that app, she said.

CarePass also allows people who download multiple apps to authorize Aetna to display data from those apps in a single dashboard, rather than having to view the data in silos.

"You can have a fitness profile that normalizes the data so it gets all the steps and miles and time duration. And the same with nutrition: you can use multiple different apps to track your caloric intake and so on."

Here's how it works: Data from a consumer's downloaded apps is pulled into CarePass' daily tracker, which normalizes the information based on a lowest common denominator, such as steps or miles for fitness apps. The data is displayed on the dashboard along with progress toward the user's personal goals, such as running a particular distance or fitting into a favorite pair of jeans.

The fitness and wellness apps that Aetna picked for CarePass include iTriage, an Aetna subsidiary that helps consumers choose providers, MapMyFitness, Jawbone, Fitbit, Withings, BodyMedia and Zipongo, which combines healthy shopping lists with local food store coupons. Altogether, the apps on CarePass have had over 100 million downloads, according to Aetna.

Access to CarePass is free, and most of the apps are also free, although vendors may charge a fee for premium access, said Wofford.

Overall, Aetna developed CarePass to "make access to healthcare information work better for consumers," she said. "We're trying to make it more connected and convenient and pull all the data together into one place."

The company is offering the service to non-members for a few reasons, she added. First, consumers are making more individual decisions about their health coverage. "So we believe it's important to be consumer preferred in the future. Part of this is an effort for consumers to see Aetna as a company that's providing convenience and making it easier for them to access care and their data."

In addition, she noted, Aetna wants to ensure that members retain their personal health data if they move to another health plan, perhaps because they switch jobs. And a "higher-purpose effort," she said, is to help control the diabetes and obesity epidemics that plague U.S. healthcare.

For the past several years, Aetna has been acquiring health IT-related companies, including iTriage, Medicity and ActiveHealth Management. CarePass is an extension of that strategy. "Real change is happening in healthcare, and we view ourselves as more of a health solutions and technology company, rather than just an insurer," explained Wofford. "So we're explicitly moving into that [health IT] space."

Many other insurers are doing the same, most notably by embracing telemedicine. Pennsylvania-based Highmark, which launched a teledermatology program a few months ago, recently revealed plans for new initiatives involving sleep medicine and aging in place. Blue Shield of California uses "gamified" wellness apps to increase member engagement. And a number of plans -- including Aetna, CareFirst, Humana, Anthem and United Healthcare -- enable members to download mobile apps that provide benefits information. CareFirst's app also has a pedometer and a symptom checker.

I think applications such as the Carepass application from Aetna are going to be the future healthcare, especially when it comes to patient involvement in their own healthcare. Having a hub where you can view information from multiple apps and being able to use that information is crucial for people that want to be more involved in their health. Empowering patients is a major part of what is going to make healthcare IT a success or a failure.

I read the privacy policy, the long and lengthy one they provide, written by lawyers and it's says data selling all over it and connecting to FitBit and Jawbone from that end sell data. I really wonder when businesses will be able to stand alone and make a profit without selling data. The big fear of course is data being used out of context against you and we see that already. It's data selling epidemic. Several folks have told me they are starting to ignore employer wellness programs too as they are getting way too nosy and it's not worth it and easier to stay outside the radar without getting more involved than they have to.

Gamilifaction doesn't work and here's a great game that exploits all of the data selling that takes place and I hope they bring more attention her as it's a epidemic and why the tangible side of our economy suffers as everyone's too busy flipping algorithms for profits.

Besides if don't understand the privacy policy policy, I'm going elsewhere for sure and there's a lot more like me out there too:) Aetna works with HeatlhVault so if they are populating the PHR they have with your data, export and run...use a non tethered PHR to where you have control as a patient over the data.

Time to license and excise tax the data sellers, banks, insurers, companies you name it as they make billions selling data and if old Walgreens is kicking around $1B just selling data, there you go, huge pool to excise tax.

We never see how many really use apps as such but outside the over reaching quantified self folks that jump on everything, I am guessing the crowd may not be too large. This falls under what consumers lose in the "free or almost free" world today of software apps.

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